A teraflop represents a thousand billion floating point operations per second, while a petaflop is a million billion operations per second.

Is it just me, or do people prefer reading large numbers as "thousands of billions" instead of using scientific notation? It seems a little obtuse to be describing them as such instead of a simple 10^12.

A teraflop represents a thousand billion floating point operations per second, while a petaflop is a million billion operations per second.

Is it just me, or do people prefer reading large numbers as "thousands of billions" instead of using scientific notation? It seems a little obtuse to be describing them as such instead of a simple 10^12.

Thousands of billions sounds more impressive than scientific notation. It conveys the fact that this will play Crysis.

A teraflop represents a thousand billion floating point operations per second, while a petaflop is a million billion operations per second.

Is it just me, or do people prefer reading large numbers as "thousands of billions" instead of using scientific notation? It seems a little obtuse to be describing them as such instead of a simple 10^12.

I was thinking the same thing... The words are becoming cumbersome to the point of being useless, and scientific notation would be so much easier and efficient... This is a quasi-scientific forum, so I would think most of the readership would be familiar with this notation, or he able to easily learn and understand it.

A teraflop represents a thousand billion floating point operations per second, while a petaflop is a million billion operations per second.

Is it just me, or do people prefer reading large numbers as "thousands of billions" instead of using scientific notation? It seems a little obtuse to be describing them as such instead of a simple 10^12.

Yes, "thousand billion" is stupid; but "million million" is all right. In the good old days, the BBC used to talk that way to avoid ambigiouty. "Billion" could mean either 10^9 (American) or 10^12 (old-style British, similar to other European languages).

Is it just me, or do people prefer reading large numbers as "thousands of billions" instead of using scientific notation? It seems a little obtuse to be describing them as such instead of a simple 10^12.

I was thinking the same thing... The words are becoming cumbersome to the point of being useless, and scientific notation would be so much easier and efficient... This is a quasi-scientific forum, so I would think most of the readership would be familiar with this notation, or he able to easily learn and understand it.

Actually I don't like scientific notation. "2*10^6 atoms" is much less clear that "2 million". But after you get to about 10^9 things flip. I think it is high time more people learned the Mega, Tera, Peta, ... system. So good on Ars for trying to teach it. But on a geek forum like this, maybe it should just be taken as assumed knowledge.

The "Linux out of the box" thing is hardly important, but it makes for a nice smile. When Linux fans complain "the drivers are great, but the HW manufacturers tune the bugs for Windows" people will quite reasonable respond "But whatever the cause, the result still sucks".

That response is right, until you look at a case where the manufacturer targets Linux; as they do in that HPC world. And that's why this article is ***ing stupid (or at least the tone is stupid, I have no way to judge the factual claims).

This article (and most of the press-release-regurgitating articles around the Web) gets the processor wrong; these systems use Xeon E5-2600 series chips (Sandy Bridge-E), not the rather ancient Xeon 5400.

This isn't actually that much of a premium over the classic home-made cluster of E5-2600 1U dual-socket machines with FDR Infiniband connectivity ($6000 for each node, $650 for the network card, $250 for the switch port); I think you're paying Cray about 10% extra and getting a much more physically compact machine.

This article (and most of the press-release-regurgitating articles around the Web) gets the processor wrong; these systems use Xeon E5-2600 series chips (Sandy Bridge-E), not the rather ancient Xeon 5400.

This isn't actually that much of a premium over the classic home-made cluster of E5-2600 1U dual-socket machines with FDR Infiniband connectivity ($6000 for each node, $650 for the network card, $250 for the switch port); I think you're paying Cray about 10% extra and getting a much more physically compact machine.

But is it a problem that the thing is more closed? Does it make upgrades or upkeep more expensive? Does it somehow make you come back for a millin dollar support contract? Or maybe that sort of thing is going to happen to you anyway.

128 processors per (I assume) 42U cabinet seems like lower density. I don't have a good reference point for systems like this. And I understand that it is air cooled. Do any other readers know how many high end processors you can jam into a 42U cabinet?

It's been sold to SGI, then to Tera .. the only thing the same by now is the name.

Also, doesn't this read kinda like a press release to you guys?

As much as I have huge respect for old-school Cray, and the magnificent plumbing-and-wiring fu that went into their hardware(plus the cool chassis designs), this hardware is as distant from the original Cray as the corporate structure is.

Between AMD and Intel on the CPU side, and now the GPU compute crew, it hasn't been ecnonomic for anyone(except a few IBM Power systems here and there) to actually do processors anymore. I think Cray's last in-house processor was some sort of vector accelerator add-on in 2007ish.

What Cray sells you now is interconnect(along with system integration). If you have a relatively loosely coupled problem, and you can get away with infiniband or 10GbE, blades, or even boring 1U commodity-boxes, have exactly the same compute punch. If you need tighter coupling, or single-system-image across a whole lot of sockets, though, Cray has the stuff that makes that work.

FYI, the injection rate quoted in the article is incorrect. It should be 10GB/s or 80Gbps, according to the cited paper. For sustained bi-directional traffic, the throughput slows to 7.5GB/s still significantly faster than today's 56Gbps infiniband or 40G Ethernet network cards.

It would be a shame if Cray's fastest network is no better than 10G ethernet.

The new XC30-AC systems announced today range in price from $500,000 to roughly $3 million, providing speeds of 22 to 176 teraflops. That's just a fraction of the speed of the aforementioned world's fastest supercomputer, the $60 million Titan, which clocks in at 17.59 petaflops. (A teraflop represents a thousand billion floating point operations per second, while a petaflop is a million billion operations per second.)

Yes, it's a fraction of the speed of Titan, but Titan is actually cheaper per FLOP by a lot.

Lets do that math shall we? XC30-AC at its cheapest is 22 tflop for $500k. You get 8x the performance for 6x the money on the $3million XC30.

128 processors per (I assume) 42U cabinet seems like lower density. I don't have a good reference point for systems like this. And I understand that it is air cooled. Do any other readers know how many high end processors you can jam into a 42U cabinet?

For simplicity i'm going to refer to processor count per system as 1S, 2S, 4S as 1, 2 and 4 socket.

Well, typical 2u systems can do up to 4SYou've got blades where you could put 8 4S blades in 10U, 16 2S blades in 10U or 32 2S blades in 10U.You've also got some "Cloud" type converged architecture systems where you could put 8 2S "sleds" in 4U

The highest density that i can see is 64 CPU per 10U with Dell quarter-height blades, you'd be able to do 256 CPUs in a 42U cabinet. Though, powering and cooling might be an issue for most datacenters as each chassis can be configured with up to 6 2700W power supplies. 64kW is just a LOT for a rack

128 processors per (I assume) 42U cabinet seems like lower density. I don't have a good reference point for systems like this. And I understand that it is air cooled. Do any other readers know how many high end processors you can jam into a 42U cabinet?

With 1Us you'd have ~80 processors per rack; with blades you could have up to ~160. Fitting 128 and the Aries interconnect seems reasonable.

We had a cray sales critter in recently to tell us what they had going on with big storage and compute. It was the same stuff we were doing from scratch (lustre, infiniband, MPI) except 4x as expensive.

It's been sold to SGI, then to Tera .. the only thing the same by now is the name.

Also, doesn't this read kinda like a press release to you guys?

I'm sure old Seymour would be devastated and is rolling in his grave over the fact that the company with his name on it still sells the fastest computers in the world.

Cray's genius was always in seeing a whole system for the supercomputer and designing accordingly. Though sort of like Einstein and quantum theory, he was very late in accepting the role of MPP in supercomputing.

I'm enough of a geek that I thought it was really cool that my company was using the old CDC datacentre where the CDC 6600 (direct predecessor of the Cray-1) was designed and deployed.

XC30-AC systems ship with Intel Xeon 5400 Series processors, and it's the first Intel-based supercomputer Cray is selling into smaller businesses, what it calls the "technical enterprise" market.

Judging from the picture, Cray is using E5-2600 series Xeons on socket LGA 2011.

Going by the block diagram, the system could double the number of sockets: it is possible to configure four socket LGA 2011 based processors into one logical node. This would also double memory capacity. Physically fitting all of these chips and the necessary cooling into nice chassis is another matter.

While Gemini was built on top of Hypertransport, Aries is built on top of PCI express. I don't know how that works out, but I'd take Gemini over Aries, since it's one step closer to the CPUs.

Specialized companies like Numascale also have solutions on top of Hypertransport so you can wire racks of amd machines together to act as one. Fascinating tech, as long as your codes do know what NUMA is and how to act in such environment.

XC30-AC systems ship with Intel Xeon 5400 Series processors, and it's the first Intel-based supercomputer Cray is selling into smaller businesses, what it calls the "technical enterprise" market.

Judging from the picture, Cray is using E5-2600 series Xeons on socket LGA 2011.

Going by the block diagram, the system could double the number of sockets: it is possible to configure four socket LGA 2011 based processors into one logical node. This would also double memory capacity. Physically fitting all of these chips and the necessary cooling into nice chassis is another matter.

Four Socket Intel you need to move to the E5-46xx series, E5-26xx series doesn't work in 4S

While Gemini was built on top of Hypertransport, Aries is built on top of PCI express. I don't know how that works out, but I'd take Gemini over Aries, since it's one step closer to the CPUs.

Specialized companies like Numascale also have solutions on top of Hypertransport so you can wire racks of amd machines together to act as one. Fascinating tech, as long as your codes do know what NUMA is and how to act in such environment.

I can't speak to the veracity of the Gemini/Aries foundations, but I would note that as of Nehalem Intel processors integrate the PCIe controller into the processor.